Our theme this month is unnamed innovators – the inventors of the American banjo who were enslaved in the American south created bluegrass and country music but are completely unknown today. Most people don’t realize that it was unheard of for white people to play the banjo up until the late 1890’s.

Also, the early US bluegrass and country musicians often had black mentors, but the black roots of country music were completely erased as a result of race segregation in record sales! We’ll go into that more, but it does make you look at American culture in an entirely different way as more of the true history comes out.

We’ll have a small history of the banjo–here Jake Blount talks about his explorations of the banjo and recovery of African-American folk music!

• Sign up for hardware hack night and other events here – https://lu.ma/sudoroom

It gets you thinking – how many more discoveries will we make that will inspire new instrument creations? How can revisions of history help us better understand cultures, diversity, and the true spirit of the United States as we go forward into the rest of the 2020’s?

Books like 1491 radically updated our understanding of precolombian indigenous cultures in the Americas for the mainstream public… will exploring the banjo and projects from Jake Blount and the Carolina Chocolate Drops help African Americans reclaim country music and help us better appreciate the American experiment?

Learn More

• See a past event at the Oakland Museum and learn about Hannah Mayree and the Black Banjo Reclamation Project
• Library of Congress Research Guide: African-American Banjo players – https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2023/07/new-research-guide-african-american-banjo-players/
• Banjos at the Smithsonian Museum https://www.si.edu/spotlight/banjos-smithsonian